In 2019, Yale professor Hazel V. Carby was the Distinguished Visiting Humanist at the University of Rochester. A major Black feminist scholar and prize-winning author, Carby’s visit led to a special issue, “Black Studies Now and the Countercurrents of Hazel Carby,” just published by InVisible Culture, the graduate-student led journal of the Graduate Program in Visual & Cultural Studies. Co-edited by Joel Burges (Associate Professor of English and Director of VCS), Alisa V. Prince (Ph.D. Candidate, VCS), and Jeffrey Allen Tucker (Associate Professor of English), the issue brings together new work by Carby on Black futurities and imperial archives, essays by scholars at Princeton, Rutgers, Tulane, and Wesleyan, and a cluster of articles by faculty, staff, and graduate students at the University of Rochester.
Responding directly to the civil unrest and racial reckoning of 2020, including the murder of Daniel Prude in Rochester, this wide-ranging special issue showcases what Black Studies both is and could be at present by engaging with the countercurrents that flow through the thinking and writing of one of the most important scholars of the Black diaspora of the past fifty years. The issue can be found here.